Chapter Nine #3
“Not a video?”
He shakes his head.
“It has to be live.”
Now I’m the one watching him. There’s a rigidity to the way he’s holding his mouth, and the look of determination in his brown gaze makes me hesitate in switching to the livestream app. When he looks down at me, there’s not an ounce of playfulness.
This is where our newfound ease goes to die, I’m sure of it. And even though I expected this, it still weirdly hurts.
“What exactly are you planning?” I ask.
Even with my impressively insubordinate imagination, I am astonished at his response.
James takes a deep breath, gaze not breaking from mine.
“We stage a fight,” he says.
No matter how many times I blink, it is still James Neely standing in front of me.
“A fight?”
James nods, his voice careful, like he’s explaining the plan to a character in a heist group whose one role is to look pretty as a distraction.
“It starts like a regular Q-and-A format. We read questions from note cards under the guise they’ve been sent in by viewers on Instagram or whatnot.
A question comes up that we disagree about.
We argue back and forth and you pretend to end the live, but you ‘miss’ the button, so it keeps recording. ”
If staring were an Olympic sport, I think we’d qualify. I’m not sure either of us has blinked since James started talking. How did we go from quips about throwing me off a cliff to this ?
“And then what happens?” I prompt him.
“We argue a bit more,” he says. “And then we…make it clear that we’re not actually angry with each other.”
“Make it clear…”
James raises an eyebrow at my incomplete sentence.
“We’ll kiss,” he says. “A fake one, of course, but we can make it look real for the camera.”
I hold his gaze for as long as I can bear—about half a second—and then drop my head and pretend to straighten the tripod.
“Why the argument?” I ask.
“What?”
I make myself look back up at him even though I can feel my face is still flaming red in a veritable explosion of embarrassed blush.
“Why go through the argument bit? Can’t we just post that we’re dating? Make it cute and Hallmark-y and cheesy?”
“And how many views do you think that would garner us?” he asks. “How many subscribers?”
He’s right, but I’m not saying that aloud.
“So we fight and kiss,” I say, suspicious. “That’s your plan?”
I can’t tell if he’s trying not to smile or frown, but the tension around his lips changes slightly when he says, “Do you have a better one?”
“No,” I say, peeved that my tone comes off as pouty. “But call me skeptical that anyone is going to buy it.”
“We’re just going to have to do a good job of selling it,” James says. “Make it a deal they can’t refuse.”
I’m not sure why I’m hesitating, but James can see it all the same.
“It’s just one more performance,” he says. “If we can act like we’re in love—which was your idea, by the way—and we can make it seem like viewers accidentally stumbled on this secret relationship, it’ll spread like wildfire.”
“How can you be sure?”
His face darkens.
“Trust me on this. I’m certain. The world loves nothing more than to pry. Give them an inch, they’ll take the whole horizon and make it their own.”
In the month immediately following the On the Same Page sale when my mental health was in the dumps, the only thing that kept me afloat was fantasy romance.
Romantasy. And even though I’m a lifelong romance reader and have—obviously—loved a good paranormal romance here and there, it’s not my usual go-to genre.
Serena got me hooked. Concerned when she asked what I was reading and my answer was “nothing,” she gifted me ten of her favorite ebooks.
“I’m not reading about sexy fairies,” I told her. “It’s cool that they’re your thing, but they’re not mine.”
“They will be,” she sang. “Read them. What else do you have to do?”
Which was a bitch thing to say, and exactly what I needed to hear.
I drowned in magical, courtly politics. I kicked my feet at “only one bed, but make it an enchanted bed. ” And—god help me—I absolutely swooned at every morally gray, handsome fae lord who made a bargain with the human he loved.
But James Neely is not in love with me. Not in the slightest. If he were, he would shut this down. Maybe we would try dating for real, and we wouldn’t forever be on the verge of a blowout argument or terrible silence.
He does, however, bear a certain resemblance to the staunch immortal rulers of Serena’s favorite books. Yet James is decidedly not a fae, and he isn’t out to make a bargain: This is a human man who isn’t here to haggle at all.
“What if I can’t do it?” I ask. “It’s live. What if I make a mistake and mess it up and then our whole schtick goes down the drain?”
“You can act,” James says in answer. “I’ve seen it.”
“This is different.”
“It’s not,” he insists. “I promise. It might feel odd at first, but you fall into a rhythm.”
I hesitate.
“I’ll help you,” he says. “I’ll make it as easy as possible.”
My head is spinning, and I push my fingers against my closed eyelids to try to stop the world from reeling.
“I’m so confused,” I say. “You didn’t want to do this, and now you’re not only onboard but actually orchestrating and insisting, and I don’t feel like I know why.”
“I told you,” James says from above me. “My cousin—”
“Bullshit,” I say. “I call bullshit. That can’t be all there is to it, ‘moving on’ or whatever. It can’t. I know you well enough to call your bluff on that at least.”
When the spots from rubbing my eyes too hard disappear, my vision clears to see James crouching in front of me.
“I should make you sign an NDA,” he says.
My interest spikes. Finally. The truth.
“Tell me,” I say.
James narrows his eyes at me, and I think it’s because he’s deciding if he should say what he’s thinking, but when he opens his mouth, I know it’s to gauge my reaction.
“The biggest superhero franchise in the world is considering buying the rights to Disassembled. ”
“Wow,” I say. “But what does that have to do—”
“Max,” he says, his voice strained. “If they buy it, they want me to reprise the role of Max. It’s me they want. They’ve made that very clear.”
Oh.
“That would launch you into…into superstardom,” I say. “Like… super-super stardom.”
James, still squinting at me, nods his head once.
“You don’t want that,” I say softly. “At all. Do you?”
He shakes his head, again just the once.
“It doesn’t matter what I want,” he says. “It’s the natural conclusion. My father has guided my career for as long as I’ve had one. Longer, really. This project, this audiobook foray, is just something he allowed to keep me busy while the contracts are being argued by the lawyers.”
I want to ask him about his dad—why he feels such a strong sense of obligation to do what his father thinks is best when James clearly disagrees—but this isn’t the time.
“What does that have to do with us dating?” I ask. “How could that impact—”
“If it all goes through for the sequel, they’ve proposed I date one of the female superheroes leading up to the announcement to try and distract the fans who would be big mad at the superhero company going so far out of canon.
It’s not like Max comes from a long line of comic books.
This would be unprecedented, so they’d pull out all the stops to make the transition as smooth as possible.
They’d try to make me a media darling so everyone would ignore the bit about the company going off-book. ”
“I’m not trying to complain here,” I say. “Believe me. But I’m just confused why you would fake-date me when you could fake-date her and—”
“They can’t have it,” James cuts in, voice unsteady.
“Not again.” He clears his throat. Takes a breath.
“They can’t make me go through that again with contracts and stipulations and directions on how to smile and how to look and where to go and what angle I should try to let the paparazzi see the smile when I make it, and… ”
James falls backward from his crouch until he’s lying flat on the ground. He slings his arm over his head in an eerie replica of the day I surprised him on the recording studio lawn.
I was not wrong about him being bargain-shy, then. He was burned by the biggest, baddest fae lord of all, the one who canonically takes no prisoners and demands the highest price in exchange for movie magic: Hollywood.
“I’ve said too much,” James mutters into his arm.
I pull out my phone.
“My friend Serena makes me create lists,” I tell him, even though he can’t see me. “She says the human brain can’t focus on more than a couple of pieces of information at once if there’s not a visual component. I think she’s also full of bullshit, but her list approach works so I let it slide.”
James doesn’t budge.
“So let me get this straight,” I say. “Bullet point number one: You are agreeing to fake-date me because if we’re already dating, you think that means you won’t have to fake-date somebody else for movie purposes?”
“Correct.”
“And also because your cousin Luke thinks it will help you move on from your past relationship, which…I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess was the contractually obligated one you shared with Lily Newman-Smith?”
If James is surprised at my knowledge of this, he doesn’t show it. He doesn’t show anything, because he still doesn’t move.
“Correct again.”
“Okay. Bullet point number two: I am fake-dating you because it’s going to boost our numbers and I need the money to go to New York and fulfill my lifelong dream of helping stories become real. Yes?”
“I believe so,” James says, still unmoving.
“Good,” I say. “And finally, bullet point number three, you think the best way to announce our dating to the world is by fake-arguing in front of your gorgeous rental house and then…what? We make kissing noises offscreen so everyone thinks we’re making out, and word spreads like wildfire that the two people voicing Arabella and William are dating? ”
James shifts his arm so I can watch him watch the sky.
“Did you know Foley artists who do the sounds for movies often kiss their arms to make those sounds believable?”
“I did know that, Mr. Movie Hotshot,” I say. “But thanks for sharing your wisdom with us plebes.”
James props himself up on his elbow and I think he is going to reach for my hand, but instead he sets it right next to me in the grass.
“We don’t have to,” he says, watching my face. “It’s just one idea of thousands. If you want to do something else, if you don’t want to…for the camera or at all, we can figure out another way.”
I look down at my fingers, at how red and scabby my middle finger and thumb look from weeks of snapping. I pick at one of the calluses as I mull over James’s proposition, but I’m abruptly interrupted from my thoughts when he snatches my right hand.
“My god,” he says. “Did you get into an argument with a cheese shredder?”
I try to jerk my hand back, but despite how gently James is holding it, I find I can’t reclaim it.
“Snapping,” I say. And when he looks confused, I add, “To indicate where the sound engineers need to edit? For the books?”
Realization dawns on his face, followed immediately by exasperation.
“Juniper. You could click your tongue. You could smack the stand. You could…you could have asked Catarina for an alternative.”
This time I manage to take my hand back.
“It’s not that bad,” I say. “I have sensitive skin is all. It’ll callus.”
Eventually.
He looks like he wants to say more, but instead he rises to a sitting position and sighs.
“So…the live? You down?”
I look around the idyllic backyard with the rising sun and the babbling brook and the Baba Yaga house that might get up and walk into the woods at any moment and I nod.
“I’m down.”